Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com> writes:
So, is it true that the convention is 0644 in Debian and 0755 in Red
Hat-land? If so, does anyone know why the difference, and if this needs
to stay different forever? Also, I presume neither of us is patching
several thousand shared library packages for this, so are the
permissions usually set by libtool or something similar, and that's
where the configuration is set?
I don't know all that much about the conventions for this under Linux,
but I'm familiar with other Unix-oid platforms where shared libraries
*must* have execute permission or they flat out don't work. (HPUX is
that way for sure, and I think most BSDen as well.) So it would not be
surprising for upstreams to prefer to install 0755 everywhere for
portability. I think Debian is on the wrong side here, if your
informant is correct about their policy in the first place ...
regards, tom lane